West Indian Parade Still Providing Opportunity for Officers to Expose Themselves

Let’s blame Mark Zuckerberg for this one: Without Facebook, how would members of the NYPD be able, allegedly, to post derogatory comments about September’s West Indian Parade and have the words live on the Internet forever?

“Let them kill each other,” wrote someone identifying himself as an officer on a page called “No More West Indian Day Parade Detail,” where cops allegedly gathered and used their real names and job titles without bothering with the Internet privacy settings.

““I say have the parade one more year and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out,” wrote another supposed NYPD employee.
References to “savages,” “animals” and “putting (them) in zoos” were just some of the fun descriptions used to describe the participants in the Labor Day parade, though ostensibly these officers were not talking about fellow members of the force, who seemed to enjoy themselves at this year’s festivities.

It seems incredible that an officer would jeopardize his or her career by being so Internet-unsavvy, and in fact, at least one of the cops to whom the remarks were attributed claims that he was Catfished. Officer Nick Virgilio came forward as one of the officers whose name appeared next to the nasty comments, and told The New York Daily News, “I tried to reach out to Facebook because I’ve had problems with people going on there who wrote things that I had nothing to do with. This happened a couple of times, most recently several months ago.”

So when it’s Salman Rushdie‘s name in jeopardy, Facebook bends over backwards to let him use whatever moniker he wants, but when its a police officer accused of making racist and threatening comments, the social-networking site doesn’t bother to investigate the validity of their users’ identities?

Of course, if the officers are just trying to get fired, Gothamist noted that the NYPD Rant message board remains as good a place as any to find ignorant officers mouthing off inappropriately.